That the police force in New Orleans is “a significant threat to the safety of the public”, as the DoJ says, is obvious. But the same problems can be seen all over the South, from Miami to Mississippi to Alabama; and the same nationwide, according to Paul Craig Roberts, a former editor of the Wall Street Journal and former assistant secretary to the treasury under Ronald Reagan, who wrote recently: “Police in the US now rival criminals, and exceed terrorists as the greatest threat to the American public.”(via)

The primary engineer on the first cartridge based games console has sadly passed away. Jerry Lawson was the lead creator of the Fairchild Channel F video games machine, as part of the home-brew computer club in the mid 70s where people would meet and talk about creating hardware and home-brew software, members of such clubs were names such as the co-founders of Apple Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs who helped pioneer home computing with their Apple machines, Jerry Lawson never became such a household name but the work he did helped pave the way for others in the video games industry.

Another outlier. Of course history will show that the Fairchild, which predated Atari would succumb to its rivals – like ColecoVision, but prior to his work, consoles only shipped with the games already in them. Thanks to him games could be sold on individual cartridges. Oh those damn cartridges.

Even though it was frustrating, it was somehow also weirdly satisfying when you blew on that Blades of Steel and made it work.

God should blow on his casket and see if he can bring him back to life. RIP.